“The ad has to really connect with consumers on an emotional level,” he said.

Daboll went on to say that consumers should be able to remember the brand, the product, and goal of the ad.

What’s your all-time favorite Super Bowl commercial? We’d love to know.

Interestingly, many brands think that getting a celebrity spokesperson will automatically guarantee success. Based on the ad effectiveness research from Ace Metrix, Daboll said this is completely false. The company found that, during last year’s Super Bowl, ads that didn’t include celebrities performed 9.2 percent better than those ads with celebrities.

What’s even more interesting is that Ace Metrix found that animals are a much safer bet than celebrities. According to its data, 21 percent of ads with animals performed better than ads with celebrities.

Daboll told us that celebrities stir emotions, both for the good and for the bad. Animals, on the other hand, appeal to a large demographic.

It appears that Sketchers is paying attention to this research since it replaced its spokesmodel Kim Kardashian with a dog earlier this month.

Here’s Kardashian’s 2011 Super Bowl ad for Sketchers:

Last year’s research also shows that Internet companies need to step up their game this year. Half of Ace Metrix’s 10 least effective Super Bowl ads were from dot-com companies such as Salesforce, Groupon, LivingSocial, and GoDaddy.

“The Internet companies think they’re funny and just roll with it,” said Daboll. “A lot of times they just completely miss the mark.”

Chances are, everyone remembers Groupon’s Tibet ad that sparked so much conflict for the company.

Daboll believes if Groupon had tested this ad, it wouldn’t have been aired. He said testing is a key component of success and that it’s surprising how many ads are not tested, even though the companies pay millions for them.

For Groupon specifically, the company was forced to deal with a major PR crisis following last year’s Super Bowl, which, no doubt, cost the company considerably.

Many brands also make the mistake of targeting too narrowly for the big game. Daboll told us that Super Bowl ads should be created for broad appeal. If a brand is trying to reach a group of young males, a specific group of women, or some other very niche demographic, he said that the Super Bowl was not the right venue.

For this year’s Super Bowl, there has been a little controversy since more and more companies are releasing their ads early. They’re argument is that the ad can gain more momentum, especially in social media.

One of the most popular early releases is Honda’s CRV commercial that is a mini follow up to the hit movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

While Daboll understands the justification for releasing ads early, he thinks it is risky since there is an advantage to having a “surprise factor.”

“If someone tells you a joke for the first time, it’s a lot funnier than if you heard it 3 or 4 times,” he pointed out.

This year will also likely see a greater integration with social media. Daboll said there would be a lot of experimentation in this area as brands determine how they can incorporate interactive elements.

Although the winners won’t be known until Sunday, Daboll said that since Coca-Cola, M&M’s, and Doritos consistently produce effective spots, they would likely be in the top this year too.

What do you think makes an effective ad? Please share your thoughts.

Zoe Saldana, Regina King, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer Takeover The SAG Red Carpet and “The Help” Takes Home … bit.ly/zXIA0M

— Alleyesonwho.com(@Bfamousent) January 30, 2012

Check out the winners from the 2012 Screen Actors Guild Awards… Which winner do you think deserved their SAG… fb.me/1jeRgt0Zi

— InterFACE(@interfacenetwk) January 30, 2012

Dianna Agron’s fishtail braid up-do is our favourite SAG Awards’ hairstyle! Perfect for Spring bit.ly/xaVNUH

— Cloud Nine Official (@CloudNineC9) January 30, 2012

Emma Stone is my pick for best dressed on the SAG Awards #eredcarpet! Play the #poseoff game! eonline.com/poseoff

— carolina paz alarcón (@c_aybar) January 30, 2012

LOVE all the Red! 18th Annual SAG Awards – I love award season, partially because I think it is wonderful… tmblr.co/ZeMDpwFdAI_c

— Jay Godfrey (@jay_godfrey) January 30, 2012

Welcome to Monday! What did you think of the SAG Awards last night? Major kudos to best supp. actress winner @OctaviaSpencer!

— Avenue Productions(@AveModels) January 30, 2012

Was Viola Davis sizzling last night or what? Loved the look from head to toe! fb.me/sQjvXo07

— LDVFashionFix.com (@LDVBlog) January 30, 2012

“Glee” Guys Swarm the 2012 SAG Awards: Adding their handsomeness to the red carpet, the guys of “Glee” turned up… bit.ly/ysCcMe

— Angelina Jolie (@Angelina_Joliee) January 30, 2012

‘The Help’s’ SAG sweep goo.gl/SIVHB

— Katie Schultz (@katieschultz08) January 30, 2012

Way to go ladies of The Help winners at the SAG Awards! Back with Frank and the gang! Listen to Moviemoma! #sagawards

— Dawn Meadows Dixon (@MovieMoma) January 30, 2012

Red Carpet Winners at the 2012 SAG Awards: Fashion sizzled at the SAG awards in Los Angeles last night. The 2012… exm.nr/zLam7y

— Style Urls (@styleurls) January 30, 2012

With hot fashions and hot categories, the SAG awards were one of the focal points of the weekend, if you’re a cinephile. With all the twitter buzz, what’re your opinions on this past weekend’s awards? Did your favorite actor/actress win? Did your favorite show get any nominations or awards? Let us know in the comments.

Whether you believe it or not, celebrities are risky business. In last year’s ads, commercials that did not feature celebrities as a main point did 9.2% better than those which did. Just 5 of the ten least effective ads last year that featured celebrities were Groupon’s ad featuring Timothy Hutton, Lipton’s ad featuring rapper Eminem, GoDaddy.com’s ad featuring Joan Rivers, SalesForce.com’s ad starring Will.I.Am and Stella Artois’ commercial featuring Adrian Brody.

Animals can be an advertisers best friend. Ads with animals did substantially better than ads with celebrities, performing 21% better. Also Animal ads did 14% better than those ads not featuring animals.

Just a couple of the top 6 ads from last year according to Ace Metrix

Automotive brands such as Chevy, Ford and Dodge are typically one of the most effective advertisers. Last year, Volkswagen’s “The Force” ad was the top automotive ad being 10% more effective than the average ad. It also took the the 8th most effective ad of the game. The major theme of last year’s game was “Made In America” half of the top ten ads featured companies such as dodge, ford and chevy.

Internet brands, statistically, have never faired well. There were no dot.com ads in the AceMatrix.com top 10 Super Bowl ads last year. Half of the top 10 least effective Super Bowl ads featured dot.com names.

Foobang! is a newly available app for iPhone that aggregates every bit of news information of your preferred celebrities into a source on your phone. The break down the goods on their website:

In a matter of seconds, you can instruct Foobang! to retrieve information about your favourite stars, athletes, TV show hosts, models and politicians.

Foobang! continuously crawls thousands of sites, blogs, and Twitter feeds for the information you want the most.

Thanks to its push notification system, you’ll always be the first to be informed. As soon as any article on one of your favourite celebrities is published, it is instantly analysed and sent to your phone.

If you’re wondering about the stalkery applications of this iPhone app, uh… yeah. Watch this movie that Foobang! put together that I guess is supposed to show you how easy it is to follow around celebrities but leaves me feeling very disturbed with how it’s narrated. Do they really want you to use the app this way? Ugh. Just watch it.

See what I mean? Stalker-ific.

If that’s your thing, though, Foobang! could be an asset to you. As you see below, it basically crawls “thousands of sites” on the Internet for every crumb of information about your victim target celebrity of choice:

Celebrity gossip is ubiquitous enough in our culture that Foobang! isn’t really encouraging a new habit in people – it’s just streamlining the existing habits of people who already follow celebrities’ lives into one convenient iPhone app. Still, I’m pretty sure that if you use the app the way the uncomfortably curious gentleman in the Foobang! video above uses it, it’s likely that Foobang! will not pay for your court costs when you are arrested for stalking famous people who really want to eat their dinner in peace. So caveat emptor, iPhone users/celebrity followers: the app is currently available in the iPhone Apps Store.

In light of Paula Deen’s recent announcement that she has type 2 diabetes and subsequent endorsement deal with a certain line of diabetes medication, Bourdain tweeted this little gem late Tuesday:

Deen went on the Today Show earlier this week to announce the fact that she’s been dealing with the disease for a while. Naturally, due to her cooking style and the abundance of butter, butter and more butter, the internet put on their best “wow, what a shocker” face.

The story got another ruffle when reports emerged about Deen’s new gig – as a spokeswoman for the Novo Nordisk campaign, promoting a new diabetes medication. She just recently began promoting the drug via Twitter:

Now, we aren’t going to say that Paula Deen cooked and ate herself into a serious illness and is now profiting off of said illness, but Bourdain’s tweet seems to implicate as much. TMZ later put words in his mouth, saying that he called her a “diabetic scam artist.” Bourdain clarified that those were their words, not his:

He has continued to tweet about Deen’s situation – responding with “fair enough” when one Twitter follower said “I’ll say the same thing about you when you are the sopkesman for liver disease.”

This is not the firs time that Anthony Bourdain, Paula Deen and Twitter had an incredibly humorous ménage à trois. He said that Deen was the “cook worst for America” and made fun of her donut burger back in August 2011.

Lady Gaga has become the first Twitter user to reach 18 million followers.

She announced this milestone with a tweet, reminiscing about a time when she barely had any Twitter followers:

Gaga has come a long way in the past few years, especially when it comes to her internet presence. Some of her videos are among the most viewed YouTube videos of all time. When he tried to release her album Born This Way for $0.99 on Amazon, she pretty much broke the internet. She’s made an impression on Twitter (obviously), Facebook and even Tumblr.

And she has just expanded her social reach, joining Google+ earlier this week. Having only posted three times, Gaga has already amassed over 12,000 followers on the social site.

Here’s how fast Lady Gaga has attracted followers in the past few months: The singer hit the 10 million follower milestone in the middle of May, 2011. She was the first to reach this number as well. That means that in about 8 months, she’s gained 8 million new followers. I’m sure you can do the math, but that means that Gaga’s grabbing about 1 million new followers a month.

If second place Twitter user Justin Bieber wants to steal the crown, he’s going to have to work pretty hard. He currently sits nearly 1.6 million followers behind Lady Gaga.

Danny Sullivan suggests Google’s “Search Plus Your World” features may have played a role, given that when you search Google now for “music,” there is a good chance you’ll see Britney Spears and Snoop Dogg because of their Google+ profiles. Other musicians will likely follow suit.

It’s good to know that there are artists on Google+ now that aren’t from the 90s.

As Sullivan points out, it’s interesting that Gaga wasn’t already on Google+ given that she’s actually visited Google HQ. Here are a couple of Google-related Lady Gaga videos:

Sullivan also notes the lack of another popular-on-social media artist, Justin Bieber from Google+. It’s worth noting that he has also appeared in Google videos:

I’m sure Google has no hard feelings about his absence from Google+ given all the YouTube hits he’s brought in for them.

So far, Lady Gaga has made 3 public updates, all on January 15:

“I know I’m a little late but Born This Way one Favorite Album of the Year at the People’s Choice Awards! So amazing thank you so much!”

“sorry I meant won*..*too many beers* Anyone watching the Giants game?”

The account is verified, by the way.

Celebrity use played a significant role in getting more people to use Twitter. Will it do the same for Google+? I don’t see why not, especially considering they’ll be much more visible in search results. I guess that’s why Twitter has a problem with “Search Plus Your World”.

And as anyone who followed Kanye back in ye olden tymes knows, he did not disappoint. Whether he was discussing the merits of beef flavored pineapples, fur pillows or even ninjas, Mr. West was always a bright spot in my Twitter stream.

Then something happened. Kanye stopped tweeting. Well, he didn’t really stop tweeting altogether, but the volume of tweets went down – way down. So much so that there were week-long periods where we didn’t get one single musing from him.

But now, it appears as though Kanye might be back as a Twitter force, as he went on a nearly 100-tweet rampage that spanned only a few hours on Wednesday evening.

And during that rampage, Kanye tackled the Grammys, the education system, and announced a new design company called DONDA. During all of that he also slipped in some stuff about Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson. All in all, a successful little thought stream.

Here’s what Kanye says about his idea for DONDA:

A little vague perhaps, but you can’t say it’s not a large-scale idea. He also took on this year’s Grammys:

Then it was on to the American education system:

And the visionaries we need to model our thoughts after to achieve all of this? Michael Jackson and Steve Jobs, of course:

Kanye ended the night with a George Bernard Shaw quote:

Despite what you think about Kanye’s big ideas (and I happen to agree on some of the education stuff), you have to admit that it’s a blast to run through it all. Legitimate big ideas or drug-induced ramblings, it doesn’t really matter to me. It’s just nice to have one of Twitter’s biggest stars back in the game. Let’s just hope he stays there. I’m sure some of this new batch of tweets is worthy of a stitching.

Drunk dialing.

But while most cases of drunk dialing involve ex-girlfriends and bad decisions, Stern’s NYE calling marathon was pretty tame.

It all began on Twitter, where Stern announced to his nearly 1,000,000 followers that we would be calling some lucky fans:

Over the course of the night, Stern and his wife apparently called over 50 people. They were able to reach a good percentage of the ones they called – and ended up leaving voicemails for those who missed the call.

As you can see, the interactions are quite genuine:

and…

By night’s end, Stern said his goodbyes to fans:

Some of the voicemails have found their way to YouTube:

Howard doesn’t sound too drunk. But inebriated or not, the New Year’s Eve dialing party is a nice move from the King Of All Media.

Did Howard Stern call you?

A group of artists have contributed their two cents to a campaign promoting the usefulness and likability of MegaUpload – and it’s a rather impressive group of artists at that. P. Diddy, Snopp Dogg, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Lil Jon, Jamie Foxx, Brett Ratner and Mary J Blige are just a few of the stars that have voiced their support for the site in an incredibly odd yet somehow catchy song aptly titled “The Mega Song.”

Check it out below:

Yes, you saw MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom make an appearance in the video. Recently, Creative America put out a video detailing the horrors of content theft. In this video, they specifically go after Kim Dotcom, detailing his previous arrest for “computer hacking” and suggesting that his advertisers fail to realize that they are running ads on an illegal site.

From the looks of this Mega Song, there are at least a decent number of A-listers that are pretty big fans of MegaUpload.

With all of the SOPA/PIPA drama going on in this country, this kind of topic is particularly relevant. It’s also just too damn strange to ignore.

[Hat Tip to torrentfreak]